1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and a system making it possible to enhance an electronic message referred to as an e-mail, upon receipt thereof in a user's e-mail inbox.
2. Description of the Related Art
During about the last ten years e-mail has become the foremost medium of exchange between professionals. Gradually it is replacing paper letters, fax, telex and telephonic conversations. E-mail is a medium which can be used in a number of ways. In fact, e-mail is currently used to arrange meetings, to give instructions, to receive instructions, to plan work and retrieve information about contacts etc.
However, it is sometimes difficult to rapidly identify useful information which is buried within texts and annotations which are more or less useful.
Numerous systems exist for linguistic analysis which make it possible to process text in such a way as to highlight this useful information in the initial document or in a new document.
Document U.S. Pat. No. 4,965,763 describes a method for analyzing a document. This method consists of extracting parametric information from a document by identifying and targeting syntactic analysis on selected parts of this document. In fact, the start and end of documents are particularly analyzed in order to identify the following parametric information: author, date, receiver, address, subject, etc. The information thus obtained allows a very precise classification of the analyzed documents.
Document U.S. Pat. No. 7,054,886 describes a system which allows Internet browsing in order to recover a set of information and to set up a professional database. This information is generally extracted from Web pages using an “Extractor”.
Document U.S. Pat. No. 7,178,099 describes a method allowing the enhancement of electronic messages referred to as e-mails upon receipt thereof in an e-mail inbox. This method uses a software application capable of intercepting the incoming e-mail, analyzing the content and the items attached to this e-mail so as to produce a new document referred to as an enhanced e-mail, in particular in HTML format, comprising said content as well as an index and other information such as for example a summary of the attached items. The content can be enhanced by incorporating colour into it so as to attract attention to certain words or other items. However, with such a method, the recipient of the e-mail only receives their message once all the operations of analyzing the e-mail's content, header and attached items have been carried out. Depending on the complexity and size of the e-mail and the attached items, the analysis process can take a significant amount of time and considerably delay delivery of the message to the recipient. The same situation can occur due to hardware reasons, the analysis is not successful, which inevitably blocks the e-mail.